June 2016

AlienVault®, the leading provider of Unified Security Management™ (USM) and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, today announced that it has won an industry leadership award for Best SIEM Solution in the 2016 SC Magazine Awards Europe. Held at the Old Billingsgate in London, the awards honor professionals working to secure enterprises as well as vendors that deliver innovative security technologies.

2015 has a notorious characterization as a terrible year for data breaches in the healthcare industry. Unfortunately, even though 2016 is well underway, companies haven't made the substantial preventative measures needed to prevent the same thing from happening again. That's the conclusion reached by the Ponemon Institute after compiling data from its sixth annual survey.

Let's take a look at some of the glaring problems related to data security in healthcare, and explore why they're still so prevalent.

This eBook was written in an effort to help Hyper-V administrators diagnose various problems with the Hyper-V hypervisor and its virtual machines. Rather than try to discuss every problem that could potentially occur, the book focuses on some of the more common issues that admins will likely encounter. For each of those problems discussed, a short description of the problem and one or more step by step solutions to the problem will be provided.

The Xen Project, a project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the program and speakers for the Xen Project Developer Summit that brings together developers, integrators and power users for in-person collaboration and educational presentations. The event will take place in Toronto, Canada from August 25-26, 2016 co-located with LinuxCon North America.

The Xen Project hypervisor was built to be forward-looking and nimble like the cloud itself. It powers the new needs of computing and virtualization through a rich ecosystem of community members that focus on everything from security, embedded, and web-scale environments. The Summit is an opportunity for developers and software engineers to collaborate and discuss the latest advancements of Xen Project software. It is a neutral event focused on education and collaboration amongst those interested in Xen Project technology, virtualization and cloud computing.

Building on the existing API-first platform from Cloud CMS, the move to Docker itself was relatively straightforward.

While bundling various tiers into container images, Cloud CMS realized that it had already gone a long way toward defining a proper set of microservices. Docker formalized this reality by providing a way to package service code as well as automate the necessary testing and deployment.

This now makes it incredibly easy for Cloud CMS to manage and deliver the same Software as a Service offering on AWS while also saving in overall costs. Equally important, it opens up a world of possibilities for our customers.

Myths About Virtual File Sharing

Generally this idea falls into three areas: virtual data rooms, generic file sharing, or online collaboration tools. All three have their uses and their advocates, but the fact is that there is some overlap, and organizations may feel that all three are critical elements in communicating across wide-area networks.

DigitalOcean, a cloud computing platform, brings its first data centre in Bangalore, India. Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean offers simple on demand cloud computing resources to more than 700,000 registered customers across the globe. Bangalore becomes DigitalOcean’s eighth region globally, following New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, and Toronto.

More than 700,000 developers around the world have launched over 14 million cloud servers on Digital Ocean’s platform in just four years. In a conversation with Tech2, Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean said that the Bangalore datacenter will feature DigitalOcean’s latest servers and network architecture aimed at offering a consistent and seamless experience for users everywhere regardless of which region they select...

The Indian manufacturing sector has clearly taken center stage post the announcement of the current government’s ‘Make-in-India’ initiative aimed at raising global competitiveness of the sector for the country’s long term-growth. The vision of this first-of-its-kind policy is to witness an increase in the share of manufacturing in the country’s Gross Domestic Product from 16% to 25% by 2022. The government has listed technology as of the key contributing factors in achieving this target.

A lot rests on the Indian manufacturing sector to up the ante in terms of growth performance to compliment efforts made to make India ‘the next manufacturing destination’. According to a research report on the technology adoption trends among manufacturing enterprises in India, ERP is the largest priority for spend in a CIO’s budget with significant growth expected over the next 5 years...

A new blog post by Elena Bonfiglioli, senior director of the EMEA health industry in Microsoft’s Public Sector division, has highlighted how cloud computing can help the European healthcare sector improve medical care in powerful ways. “It empowers 3,600 mobile caregivers working in the field of mental health in Arkin to be more productive and deliver better care,” she explains.

“It opens up new ways of engagement for mental health patients in Finland through the Health Village. It optimises care processes with remote support and post stroke management in the NHS. It provides a digital identity and a resilient future proof infrastructure for all care givers in the HSE ensuring doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers have access to the real-time information they need – when they need it...

Bright Computing and ProfitBricks have joined forces to offer an elastic high performance computing (EHPC) solution to speed up deployment of clusters and save costs with a pay-per-use model. The new offering combines ProftBricks' IaaS with Bright Computing's infrastructure management tech to offer a fully-scalable way of managing the infrastructure to power data-intensive workloads.

Supporting both traditional HPC and HPC-based Big Data analysis with Hadoop or Spark environments, ProfitBricks and Bright Computing's solution allows enterprises, research institutes and universities to have a more flexible approach when running analysis. “Cloud-based solutions are increasingly appealing as they offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premise solutions," Petra-Maria Grohs, CSO EMEAA at ProfitBricks said. "Infrastructure is no exception and we are excited at the level of interest we are seeing in moving HPC and Big Data environments into the cloud, in order to unlock cost and time savings.”...

Given the strength of SQL Server in business, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft has spent the last five years building a distributed NoSQL database – until you remember that services like Power BI, Bing and the Office Web apps face the same challenges as services like Netflix. They’re problems more and more enterprises have to deal with too: the deluge of data, the demands of mobility and the need for low latency even though you’re relying on cloud services.

That’s why Microsoft’s Dharma Shukla, who previously built key technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation (and worked on both Live Mesh and the never-shipped Courier tablet), has been developing Microsoft’s global-scale distributed database since the end of 2010. DocumentDB, which launched in April 2015, emphasizes the fact that NoSQL really stands for “not only SQL,” because the aim is to give you the best of both worlds...

With EMC shareholders ready to vote on the Dell-EMC merger next month, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was in Toronto meeting with Canadian partners and media last week to provide an update on the company and his vision for the future of cloud computing. Over the hour-long conversation, Talkin’ Cloud came out with 5 key takeaways on the cloud landscape, how channel partners can be successful, and how being wary of change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To read the full interview, go to Talkin’ Cloud sister site The WHIR.

1. Vendors, Partners Must Adapt – or Get Left Behind

The technology landscape is changing at a rapid pace – and vendors, partners, everyone in the ecosystem has to navigate through those changes to be successful. “None is as significant as the period we are in right now,” Gelsinger said. “You have consumer-driven technologies, the shift from on-premise to off-premise, the disruptive effects of mobile and mobile cloud, change of business models from perpetual and capitalized to subscription, all of these are creating such violent shifts that everybody, including us, needs to navigate to the other side of that.”...

Microsoft announced on Monday that it's dropping $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, the social network geared towards resumes, employment history, and connecting corporate professionals and white-collar workers. It's a generous offer: The buy per share is 49.5 percent over where LinkedIn's stock closed on Friday. It may seem quixotic when a tech giant known for its personal computer businesses buys a social network. But if you dig through Microsoft's history, there's a pretty clear strategy here.

Microsoft got going as a dual juggernaut in both the world of PCs and the software you run on them. It's not just individual consumers who buy PCs — it's also companies, and they buy in bulk. This provided an excellent opportunity for Microsoft to place its PCs, its Windows operating systems, and its software package of Microsoft Office products into one big grab bag for bulk buyers...

IBM and longtime partner SugarCRM announced today that companies now have the option of running the Sugar customer relationship management (CRM) platform across IBM’s worldwide network of cloud data centers. That arrangement promise security-rich cloud environments, data isolation and performance, SugarCRM said. Based in Cupertino, Calif., SugarCRM produces the Web application Sugar, a CRM system available in both open source and commercial open source applications. A typical end user for Sugar is in a regulated industry such as banking, healthcare or financial services.

Partnership Means New Offerings

By choosing IBM Cloud, Sugar can be deployed across bare metal cloud servers, dedicated off-premises clouds or private cloud environments behind the firewall, according to SugarCRM. IBM Cloud is the only cloud company to offer SugarCRM customers those options. Organizations will also gain access to on-demand, scalable computing power, a global footprint, and a fast, private network via IBM's 46 cloud data centers worldwide, according to a statement from the companies...

As the story of cloud computing continues to unfold, channel partners are encountering some interesting and perhaps unexpected plot twists. Recent research suggests organizations continue to push decisively to the cloud. Survey results released last week by Insight Enterprises, a hardware, software, cloud and service provider based in Tempe, Ariz., revealed that more than 80% of organizations plan to invest in cloud services in 2016.

Large and medium-sized organizations are poised to be the biggest adopters, but 72% of small companies are also ready to invest in cloud technology. The Insight-commissioned research is based on a survey of 403 IT professionals. But while adoption continues, many organizations lack a coherent cloud governance model and financial management strategy for successful deployment...

VMware announced a new acquisition of a relatively unknown company, Arkin Net, a provider of software-defined data center security and operations. Although financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, VMware did say that they expect the transaction to close by the end of June 2016. The deal is expected to help enhance VMware's ability to build and manage virtual networks tied to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines.

Arkin is an established business partner of VMware, and it was founded in 2013 to bring management enhancements to virtual networks. This year, Arkin was named by Gartner as one of its "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking."

Yesterday, Infinio announced the General Availability of version 3.0 of Infinio Accelerator, which helps to bring unprecedented storage performance to VMware environments. VMblog followers and VMware community members may already be quite familiar with Infinio, but from what I've already witnessed in a recent briefing, this 3.0 release is set to further Infinio’s reputation for delivering high performance storage acceleration for VMware environments. I was amazed at the raw performance improvements coming out of this release. VMware datacenters will be quite pleased.

The solution is certified as VMware Ready and operates with VMware Storage Policy-Based Management. And Accelerator 3.0 will serve the needs of organizations looking to deliver never before seen storage performance for next-generation applications supporting financial, healthcare, and scientific industries; as well as help IT departments with more traditional needs of back-office databases, enterprise applications, and virtual desktops dramatically reduce storage costs.

After the announcement, I reached out to Sheryl Koenigsberg, head of marketing at Infinio, to find out more.

Skytap, Inc., a popular cloud service for application modernization, is announcing a driver for Docker Machine. The Skytap Driver extends the native functionality of Docker Machine to Skytap Cloud. With this new feature, enterprises can safely modernize traditional on-premises application architectures to container architectures within Skytap Cloud, without impacting any currently in-use environments.

Enterprises are in the evaluation stage of adopting container technologies while concurrently trying to modernize traditional applications. "Some legacy vendors experiment with running their applications in containers. Elsewhere, enterprise software architects increasingly turn their attention to breaking monolithic legacy apps into their constituent parts, each running in scalable, portable containers," wrote Paul Miller, senior analyst serving CIOs at Forrester, in a May 2016 brief titled, "Brief: Why The CIO Must Care About Containers."

Cloudistics, a superconverged enterprise cloud platform, today announced that it has closed $15 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Cloudistics' groundbreaking infrastructure technology, which addresses the deployment and management challenges faced by today's IT departments as they wrestle with hyperconvergence as well as public and private cloud, holds the potential to radically revolutionize the datacenter. Series A funding will be used to invest in sales, customer support, marketing, and R&D, and will enable the Company to accelerate its vision of making superconverged infrastructures ubiquitous in enterprise datacenters.

"The superconvergence of network, storage, compute, virtualization, and management in the enterprise datacenter is a $100 billion business opportunity in infrastructure technology today with Cloudistics squarely in the epicenter of this third wave of datacenter innovation," said Najaf Husain, co-founder and CEO of Cloudistics. "Our platform is completely self-contained and businesses can deploy applications and native containers within minutes. Bain Capital Ventures has a very successful track record in the infrastructure software space and we are honored to welcome them as our partner to drive the long-term success of our company."

Asigra Inc. a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider, and Zadara Storage, enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) provider, have been selected by TIG, provider of cloud, connectivity and transformational managed services in the UK, to enable it to deliver a high-performance file and block storage and comprehensive cloud backup solution to its customers. This is the first time a managed services provider has deployed Asigra and Zadara Storage together. The result is a highly complementary solution that enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer aggressive, agile services that meet changing customer requirements very quickly, in a pay-as-you-go model for faster revenue realization.

"We selected Asigra Cloud Backup and Zadara Storage because they each offer a powerful solution to meet our customers' most critical business needs. However, when used together, they have dramatically improved our cloud services business," said George Georgiou, sales director, TIG. "The combined Zadara and Asigra value propositions have elevated our business agility, improved our ability to scale very quickly as customer demands dictate, and enabled us to reach revenue faster - all without large, capital expense investments. The two services are extremely complementary - and the strongest in the marketplace - and will continue to allow us to expand our services, maximize operational efficiencies and provide our customers with the leading storage and backup solutions."